The Changing Health Care Delivery System: An EBRI/ERF Policy Forum

"The health care delivery
system is really a community-based activity, and local
health care markets have become the arena, rather than
the national markets."—William Link, The Prudential Insurance
Company of America

"We're concerned that if we
overregulate what's already been created in various
markets, we will essentially recreate just a different
form of what we've always had, which is health care
providers complying with a set of rules put in place by
people who don't understand the delivery of care."—Dan Leach, Lutheran Medical
Center

"Physicians basically want to
do well. If we're given good clinically credible data,
the physicians will modify their behavior in a heartbeat,
but the incentives have to be there."—William Mohlenbrock, M.D., Iameter, Inc.

"We always understand that
every year our subscribers can choose some other plan.
That is the important dynamic that keeps us working hard
at trying to provide cost-effective care without
irritating our subscribers."—Harry Cain, Ph.D., Blue Cross and Blue
Shield Association/li>

"Medical education should
change in order to train physicians how to be
gatekeepers. Not fiscal agents, but gatekeepers who are
guides into a very complicated and intimidating health
care delivery system."—Cynthia Hosay, Ph.D., The Segal Company

"It is critical that an
independent watchdog maintain comparative cost and
quality performance evaluations to keep alliances and
health plans on their toes to best serve their
memberships."—Clark Kerr,
Bank of America

"While removing employers from
the `loop' is vastly preferable to requiring them to be
in it, the ideal solution is to allow employers to
participate or not as circumstances demand."—William Dennis, National
Federation of Independent Business

"If anything comes out of
health reform, the most important thing has to be the
disclosure of information. Information about quality
should be passed along to the people who use the programs
that they provide."—Charles
Inlander, People's Medical Society

"If we are really concerned
about improving health status and public health, then we
need to think about integrated systems that look at
chronic care, that take into account the role of
prevention in public health as much as, or even more
than, the need to integrate the acute care parts of the
delivery system."—John
Rother, American Association of Retired Persons